In this second group of videos, I interview Mahesh Kumar, Sr Director of Product Marketing in the Cloud Management Business Unit. In the first video we get the scoop on the new and exciting updates in vRealize Automation 7.3 platform.

Kumar tells us that the 7.3 release includes some major enhancements, including extensive capabilities to allow customers to dictate where workloads get placed. This Automated Proactive Workload Placement feature improves placement decision capabilities when provisioning new VMs, allowing customers to set placement policies based on SLAs, costing, compliance, governance or security considerations. The policies are set up in vRealize Operations and applied by vRalize Automation because the two products talk to each other, Kumar explains.

The updated vRealize Automation platform also brings automation to NSX, VMware’s network virtualization platform, says Kumar. This includes setting up advanced NSX controls for load balancing. In the video, Kumar explains how customers can now accomplish this through blueprints in the vRealize Automation platform and mentions additional NSX functionalities in the 7.3 release.

Kumar tells us that with the most recent updates, VMware has also made it easier for developers to consumer services that they frequently rely on, such as database as a service. There are also important improvement around containers and Docker, specifically.

Finally, vRealize Automation 7.3 integrates with popular third-party configuration management solutions, such as Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible and others. Kumar explains what this means for customers and how the new capability can be leveraged by using vRealize Automation’s blueprinting and workflows.

Introducing the New VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager

In a separate video, we spoke with Kumar about VMware’s new vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager and how it can help virtualization admins. Kumar explains that the vRealize Lifecycle Manager ensures that IT admins can install, patch, configure and update all of their vRealize software components, including vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations and more. It also ensures that day to day issues are taken care of in the background and that everything is running properly, all with a single pane of glass interface.